Orsoni's most beautiful gold tiles. The process for making them is extraordinarily skilful; gold leaf is cold-fused onto a backing of bluey-green glass, around 3.5mm thick.  The gold is then topped with a super-fine layer of transparent glass.  This layer is made by hand-blowing a football-sized sphere of clear glass.  The still-hot and viscous glass is gently coaxed into a long sausage-shaped bubble (known as a sbruffo - Google translate tells me this means a ‘snort'). This is cut open, and its own weight causes it to flatten into a gently-curved sheet.  Squares cut from this sheet (and known as cartoline) are then applied on top of the gold-leafed area.  Once cool, the piastre are hand cut into smaller tiles. To make the most of their particular qualities, gold tiles are usually mounted in greenish glass, while silver tiles are made with blue glass. The tiles are around 4mm thick, and measure 20 x 20mm.   You may wonder why gold and silver tiles are the same price, given that gold is relatively more expensive; the answer is that gold can be hammered into thinner sheets, so that half as much is necessary to create the same number of tiles.

Production photos © Orsoni